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The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all
things is not all things; all things are its possession- running
back, so to speak, to it- or, more correctly, not yet so, they
will be.
But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no
diversity, not even duality?
It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all
things are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the
source must be no Being but Being's generator, in what is to be
thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing,
possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in
our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the
new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been
filled and has become its contemplator and so an
Intellectual-Principle.
That station towards the one [the fact that something exists in
presence of the One] establishes Being; that vision directed upon
the One establishes the Intellectual-Principle; standing towards
the One to the end of vision, it is simultaneously
Intellectual-Principle and Being; and, attaining resemblance in
virtue of this vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring
forth a vast power.
This second outflow is a Form or Idea representing the Divine
Intellect as the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, The
One.
This active power sprung from essence [from the
Intellectual-Principle considered as Being] is Soul.
Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless
Intellectual-Principle- which itself sprang from its own
motionless prior- but the soul's operation is not similarly
motionless; its image is generated from its movement. It takes
fulness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by
adopting another, a downward, movement.
This image of Soul is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle.
Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the
human Soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal
order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is
within its province; but it is not present entire; when it has
reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having
moved thus far downwards it produces- by its outgoing and its
tendency towards the less good- another hypostasis or form of
being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the Soul) is
produced from the Intellectual-Principle which yet remains in
untroubled self-possession.
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